Eighty years ago, installing a bathtub saved two men's lives. And the message they left behind offers important lessons for today.
As The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on Monday, a Philadelphia Christ Church official searching out a water leak was surprised to discover graffiti, scrawled in pencil on the back of a bathtub:
"Tub set 1-9-33 by Louis J. Volpe. This work kept two men from starving during the Depression."
Far from hyperbole, the communiqué harks back to a time when unemployment raged and breadlines stretched for blocks. Two years before Volpe and his partner installed the tub, two out of five of their fellow Philadelphians were either jobless or struggling to survive on part-time work.
The men's words, which convey gratitude mixed with despair, offer a touching reminder of the simple power that skilled-trades jobs have always had to put food on American tables.
Today fewer Americans may be starving to death than during the Depression, but that doesn't mean U.S. workers aren't struggling to make ends meet. In 2008, nearly 50 million people in this country (more than 16 million of them children) lived in food-insecure households. Without income sufficient to cover basic needs, many families are forced to choose between food and other necessities, such as housing, healthcare, childcare, and transportation. And things are not getting better.
Each year the gap between this country's haves and have-nots continues to grow. In this weekend's Financial Times, Edward Luce picked apart the American Dream, profiling families whose stories paint a portrait of the dying middle class. Among those mentioned were Mark and Connie Freeman. Although their joint gross income of $70,000 is more than a third higher than the U.S. median, the couple says they're "never more than a pay check or two from the streets."
This story is far from unusual. Luce explains how the Great Recession has only exacerbated the country's longstanding "personal recession":
[T]he annual incomes of the bottom 90% of U.S. families have been essentially flat since 1973 -- having risen by only 10% in real terms over the past 37 years. That means most Americans have been treading water for more than a generation. Over the same period the incomes of the top 1% have tripled. In 1973, chief executives were on average paid 26 times the median income. Now the multiple is above 300.
In other words, the middle class is dying. Michael Snyder offers up 22 shocking stats that demonstrate this economic shift. Here are just a few:
These figures, coupled with the dire unemployment stats that show few signs of letting up, demonstrate real pain shouldered by millions of Americans. One might think these numbers would provide all the ammo necessary for the nation's leaders to step up and make big changes, but economists like Paul Krugman express that they have yet to hear a convincing battle cry from among the ranks.
On Sunday Krugman expressed his fear that economists and the country's lawmakers will declare unemployment a "structural" problem and "a permanent part of the economic landscape" rather than addressing joblessness head-on.
Luce confirms that fear, pointing out how "structural" scapegoating is already underway. What's worse, he continues, "is that the long era of stagnating incomes has been accompanied by something profoundly un-American: Declining income mobility."
As company profits and executive salaries reflect the corporate benefits of a global economy that provides seemingly endless access to cheap labor, increasing numbers of the United States' own workers are left ever more vulnerable to the real-life implications of economic inequality. "In today's America," explains Luce, "if you are born in rags, you are likelier to stay in rags than in almost any corner of old Europe." So much for the American Dream.
But here's the good news: Common ground among strange bedfellows.
These days people from across the political spectrum are rallying around a shared goal: They want their country back. The "Who killed the American Dream?" banners at progressive marches parallel the "Take America back" signs at Tea Party rallies. And though they may not agree on exactly how to get it back, liberals, conservatives, independents, and all those in between are speaking out, and challenging the nation's leaders to act.
As always, it's up to each of us to make the change that we are waiting for. Let's urge our government to put less effort into protecting the interests of the richest 1% of the population and more energy into devising ways for workers like Volpe, the tub-setting plumber, to bring their skilled hands to the jobs that can put food on the table, and fend off the specter of economic inequality.
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Among them the notion of externalities. A term that dismisses as irrelevant the impact of economic devastation on communites, refusing to admit the connection between good wages and the 70% of this economy which is consumer based.
This system was not divinely written in stone at some moment of creation. Nor is it the outcome of natural evolution, no matter what the econopaths and Randroids want us to believe. It is the result of rules codified in law by the political minions of the economic elite. It is not inevitable.
The right-wing traditionalist type populists value patriotism. Defense of country. We left-wing labor populists can meet them at the foundational American ideal of the common good. Which should be foundational to economics as well. Those whose labor produces the great wealth of this country have a stake in the system in which they live and work.
The elite knows the masses have the vote. They fear what would happen if we working people cease to be distracted by the bread and circuses of a dying empire. They can't keep us apart forever in an era of easy communication. Caveat emperors.
Chaos and total lawlessness will prevail during and long after any US revolution. Only the very meanest and the most evil will survive in this climate. We will have then totally destroyed our civilization. We will live like people in Africa, and we will have to comply with the will of any and every armed person that we encounter. Will all of the city residents starve after a revolution? Most of the US urban population is not knowledgeable enough to live off of the land anymore. The city dwellers might foray into the country, kill the farmers, and steal the farmer's food to feed their own families. Food might become more valuable than piles of freshly printed paper US dollars.
If any future US revolution to overthrow the US government occurs (maybe to change the economic situation), where will all of the food, fuel, water, sanitation, medicine, and other necessities to support the population come from after the revolution? These necessities will not exist after the revolutionary hostilities start.
We are approaching that point of no return, which I will define as the point where we have sold all of our privately owned assets to foreign owners to pay for our imported products that we consumed and our various US government expenses.